Posted
by
timothyon Wednesday November 10, 2010 @04:26AM
from the why-in-my-day dept.

Mark.JUK writes "CAI Harderwijk, a DOCSIS 3.0 based Cable Modem operator in the Netherlands, has apparently managed to achieve a world first by demonstrating symmetric broadband internet access speeds of 100Mbps. The tiny Dutch operator is home to just over 16000 customers and was already planning a switch onto Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) technology, although this may now be delayed. The test itself is important because cable operators are still, perhaps unfairly, seen by some as being inferior to fully fibre optic-based broadband services. In reality, cable operators are, for the most part, continuing to keep pace."

there's no point in digging, as that's already been done, and copper been pulled through;time to remove the old copper, recycle it, and pull fiber in it's stead.no need to hire millions...should take about a year for your medium-sized city

That's really how it happens at your place? At least in some (that I'm sure of) parts of the EU, I guess also Netherlands, it's basically a pipe through which stuff can be...wait for it...pulled through.

I'm also wondering why they offered 100/100 internet. Since I don't rarely need to upload anything, I'd rather have 190/10 internet so I have a fast enough pipe to grab HD video across 4 or 5 sets.

Probably because it eliminates the biggest downside to cable - that uploading kills the network. All the cable companies hates BitTorrent because uploads kill the network - once the upstream channel is flooded, everyone's service suffers. Netflix, YouTube, and anything downstream-heavy they don't care - there's pi

And yet no provider is going to stand for more than a couple of people actually operating at that speed more than a few hours a month. Lines are congested; transit isn't free. Internet access is being mis-sold just like everything else today: on the basis of a few upfront figures but ignoring the ongoing experience.

(Only yesterday I was confirming once again that there is no point upgrading my 10-year-old printer and CRT, while another dead mid-range LCD gets dismantled for parts after five years of life.)

I can go at 40-50mbit all day both directions and not a word from my ISP (capped by my inferior linksys router, actual line speed is 60mbit) - what they have realised around here is most people wont be going "balls-out" all day on their connection, there is simply a maximum for how much information any given pira.. err user can crave.

So are you confirming or disagreeing with what I said? I'm also on one of the few "Unlimited" ISPs in the country which, to everyone's knowledge, has never (for those on its premium brand) kicked someone off for excessive usage, nor does it shape traffic.

This is only possible, as staff have suggested, because pretty much everyone either transfers an insignificant amount of data or practices restraint. If even a sizeable minority were to take unrestrained advantage of the Internet's wealth of multimedia reso

This is only possible, as staff have suggested, because pretty much everyone either transfers an insignificant amount of data or practices restraint. If even a sizeable minority were to take unrestrained advantage of the Internet's wealth of multimedia resources, as has been increasingly happening with mainstream ISPs, the ISPs end up introducing fair usage policy/caps/throttling/traffic management (sometimes not revealing this last until a few technically minded people demonstrate it).

If the norm for what is "normal" to use on an unlimited line changes, then the company should change their oversubscription, not add more (*) conditions. This whole thing is created by having one product, even though we know the profitability varies greatly and trying to "clamp" it so the unprofitable ones can't actually use it as advertised. If you want a "Value" subscription that isn't like the "Unlimited" subscription, then go for it.

They've tried that here, everyone went for the cap-free subscriptions s

i am with the UK ISP mentioned by the AC above and it's 24/2.5 ADSL2+ utterly uncapped and i FTP plenty of files fdor work and stream video etc till the cows come home, download like a madman and no complaints from my isp.

i once pushed them on the contention ratio being 1:1 and was informed that it was a "virtual 1:1 contention ratio" , peforms well enough as i am close to the exchange(400 meters by wire)

The problem with 100Mb/s is that it quite often just moves the bottleneck elsewhere. A few years ago, I had a machine on campus connected to a GigE network which linked to a 34Gb/s Internet connection. When connecting to things on ja.net, I could download so fast that the bottleneck was my disk - if you watched memory usage, it would quickly shoot to 100% as the disk cache filled up and then the download speed would start to drop. For pretty much everything else, there was no noticeable difference betwee

This is the technology the Australian Coalition party is suggesting is equivalent/good enough compared to FTTH. If this is the first live deployment of it, I would want to know distances involved to get these speeds, and how many bonded pairs are required - and if these pairs are installed in Australian DOCSIS setups.

Also, no-one seems to feel that a symmetrical connection is valuable, focus is on download speed and upload speed a footnote. As a business operator with off-site backups, as well as transferri

The test itself is important because cable operators are still, perhaps unfairly, seen by some as being inferior to fully fibre optic-based broadband services

Of course cable *is* (technologically) inferior to fiber. There's no doubt about it. 100Mbps would be trivial on fiber, heck 1Gbps would be trivial on fiber. The only advantage of cable is that it's already there, whereas for FTTH the vast majority of households will have to wait for a long time until they are connected.

Cable is superior in one very important way: it is already in the ground, meaning that it costs a lot less to use than newly laid fibre. That said, the quote was about cable services being seen as inferior to fibre services, and this is often not true. A 10Mb/s cable service is clearly inferior to a 1Gb/s fibre service, but a 100Mb/s cable service is not necessarily worse than a 100Mb/s fibre service.

It is true, that fiber has more theoretical bandwidth. Light operates up in the 100s of THz range. However making use of all that potential bandwidth isn't as easy as one might hope, particularly in a passive network. Remember that FTTH is NOT fiber like you find in a data center. It is not a point-to-point, active network. It is a passive optical network. That is a point-to-multipoint setup where you have multiple people connected using passive optical splitters and you are sharing bandwidth.

Of course cable *is* (technologically) inferior to fiber. There's no doubt about it. 100Mbps would be trivial on fiber, heck 1Gbps would be trivial on fiber.

Correction: 1Gbps is trivial on fiber.

In France the number one ISP, Orange [generation-nt.com], is deploying fiber using the G-PON [wikipedia.org] technology for residential service. This means 2Gbps downstream and 1Gbps upstream. Of course they don't give you access the the full bandwidth, mostly for commercial reasons. However the point is that the 'optical modem' they send you already communicates at gigabit speeds while being cheap enough to be deployed on a large scale.

Customer service has nothing to do with cable being technologically inferior though. If GP was judging the ISPs then taking customer service into account makes perfect sense but they were only comparing the technological merits of a coax cable connection vs a fiber to the home connection.

Cable DOCSIS 3 technology can achieve 160/100 mbps to a node, which is shared between 64, 128, or even more users, depending on how cheap/small the cable company is. For comparison's sake, Verizon's FIOS uses a Passive Optical Network (PON) to share 1 or 2.4 gbps among 32 users, depending on how aged the equipment is. Currently Verizon is testing XGPON, which will allow them to deliver 10 gbps to 32 users. This will make 1 gbps connections the standard. There is no competition between cable and fiber.

With high speed Internet, at one point it might be simpler to download zip with all relevant films ever made then to download it one by one. Lets assume there is 100 quality films created each year. For one movie in reasonable quality, you need 1GB. Assuming most people are interested in last 50 years of film industry and only few pieces older then that, you get something like 5TB zip file. Now, lets assume this 100Mbps line works on average with 60% avg. speed, it means 8 days to download "movie" file. So, still plenty room for improvement. We need something to download it overnight.

I'm not so sure about that, with current state-of-the-art compression we're still looking at 720p movies weighing in at 2 GiB for decent quality. And for a lot of movies it makes a lot more sense to aim for 4 GiB rather than compromising quality just to save a little bandwidth.

If you're going with 1080p you can probably expect an average file size of 5 GiB per movie or so if you want reasonable quality. That's more like 25 TiB with 50 * 100 movies (although I find that number suspiciously high, I'm usually

Not everyone downloads to keep. Streaming is where things are currently moving, and people are going to want consistent, high performance for that. What if I want to stream and watch a different movie than the kids or the wife? That doubles the bandwidth right there.

Only a handful of commercial DVDs use both sides for the same movie, requiring the watcher to manually reverse the disk part-way, and the ones that do are generally very long (over three hour) "epics" which cannot fit on one side at standard bitrates. The use of both sides, in other words, does not significantly improve the bitrate or quality compared to shorter movies which do fit on one side.

If you think an average standard-definition DVD "looks like CRAP", particularly in the context of online streaming,

Mmmm... 720p clips in h.264 run anywhere between 1.5Mbps (tends to end up rather blocky) and as high as 7.5Mbps for more complicated clips. All depends on scene detail, how clean the source is, whether you have a lot of random elements in the background (blowing trees, ocean/lake water with lots of reflections). The middle of the range tends to be in the 3.0-4.5Mbps range for 720p and about double that for 1080p.

In the end we will end up with fiber, but not necessarily because of the obvious reasons. In Negroponte's book "Being Digital" he writes about the Chinese destroying the network because of theft of the copper. So the Chinese had to use fiber because copper based network became very expensive in numerous ways. I don't say the Dutch or citizens of any other country will steal the copper, but if there is so much speculation in the commodities prices might become so high fiber will become most attractive. I am Dutch. Just before the dot com boom I moved to a rented flat. This new flat had fiber everywhere and not yet cable. Then the dot com bubble exploded and neither the cabling, telephone or fiber company wanted to do further investments on their networks. I ended up living above a fiber network which wasn't finished and no cable, so I had to resort to my old 56K dailup modem, while most people had cable or adsl. I remember the price of downloading a debian iso image. My telephone cost where often around 800 euro's that time. Ofcourse I moved again shortly. But I still hear that on my old flat they don't have fiber, though they do have cable.

I'm in the UK. There are stories every other week about theft of metals like railway lines and signalling, telephone cabling, even manhole covers etc. for sale on the black market. It costs the companies involved millions each year and they have special insurance for it. This is part of the reason that BT uses as much fibre as they can now and are pushing FTTH or FTTC.

I was stunned to see copper guttering on the outside of buildings when I visited Europe recently. There is no way that something like tha

Wow, that gave me a great business idea, selling fake "electrocuted" birds. You put a couple of those in front of your house along with a speaker playing a buzzing/cackling sound and you can probably scare off all but the very smart or very stupid thieves:P

No, but it's the same as me saying that I'm in the US and I visited Northern America recently, or I'm in China and I visited Asia recently. Europe is a continent, the US is not (despite its ambitions).(That said, it's obviously implied to mean "elsewhere in Europe", or "Mainland Europe". And surveys shows that most English (UK, but that's another geography lesson) people don't class themselves as European. How would you like it if we referred to the US using the same word as we do for Canada and thus did

One of the things I hate about cable Internet is that, in the Netherlands (and probably elsewhere as well), consumers always seem to be given dynamic IP addresses. So, I called up CAI Harderwijk, a non-profit organization incidentally, to ask them directly about this. Apparently, they are indeed a cable operator (not an ISP), so they said this issue was always up to the various ISPs that make use of their infrastructure. Nevertheless, I asked why, in their opinion, do cable ISPs in general not offer fixed addresses? Well, they do, apparently, since this is also possible with previous DOCSIS versions, but its a privilege that is usually reserved for business customers. Most cable ISPs consider it unnecessarily expensive to provide all customers with fixed IP addresses.

Otherwise, CAI Harderwijk now have a thoroughly modern infrastructure. For instance, they can remotely control the availability of their services to individual clients. This is as opposed to UPC (the only available cable ISP in and around Amsterdam), who still have to arrange their client connections locally and manually. The latter method has the added disadvantage that a small percentage of cable customers will always enjoy services for which they do not pay -- something that is impossible to avoid due to the scale and the administration involved. CAI Harderwijk does not have this problem; an advantage that they can now pass on to their ISP customers.

Most ISPs around the world are starting to keep fixed IP addresses as an "added extra". It's nothing to do with cable/DSL/fiber.

There's two good reasons: people will pay more for fixed IP addresses and IPv4 addresses are starting to get expensive because they're running out (dynamic IP addresses can let you cram 10%--50% more users into the same address space).

Get a dynamic name instead -- you don't want to enter a number anyway.

It's not DSL, it's cable, so using coax cables instead of telephone lines. I don't know what that means for speed vs. distance though. For your information: "CAI" is Dutch for "central antenna installation". Those cables have been laid to deliver TV signals.

Secondly "laying FTTH" of course is nice, but it's also mighty expensive and disruptive to break open all the streets and dig trenches to everyone's home. These CAI cables are there already, so why not continue to use them? Just like what DSL is basically doing with telephone lines.

When building new homes of course nowadays they should put an optical fibre in the trenches that they dig already for telephone, cable TV, water pipes, power lines, etc. Then it's a relative cheap upgrade. But for existing homes this is definitely the cheaper option.

The main difference between DSL and DOCSIS cable is that DSL is your personal connection. No one is sharing it. DOCSIS cable line is shared between those on the same line, so if you have active warez people in your neighbourhood or someone hosting an active server of some kind, expect much lower speeds and higher latency then advertised.

Second difference, which has been largely negated lately is latency. DSL offers slightly lower latency by advantage of design.

Latency yes... that was (is?) an issue... I recall from 10, 15 years ago when ADSL was no more than about 1 Mbit, cable would blast it away at about 5 Mbit. Down that is; up has always been a fraction of that only.

Me downloading stuff was happy about the speed compared to ADSL lines.

Gamers however complained cable is too slow - they care more about latency than raw throughput.

And indeed cable is a shared medium but I never really had a problem with that. May be luck.

Latency may once have been an issue. I ping to AMS-IX from Groningen (Netherlands) in less than 10 ms. Usually some 5-7 ms. I use a Ziggo connection (former @Home) and have never been so satisfied with performance. Only my previous ISP could match speed and latency. That was the university using ethernet and fiber connected to the educational backbone.

>>>I recall from 10, 15 years ago when ADSL was no more than about 1 Mbit,

Yeah well ADSL is now 100 Mbit/s with a just-released 200 Mbit/s standard being rolled out. Unfortunately you have to live in Korea or Japan to get it.:-| Still the technology exists to enable DSL to match Cable speeds, and it's a dedicated phone line not a shared neighborhood coax cable, so the user gets what is advertised.

DSL proponents like to point out the shared nature of cable, but forget that all internet connections get shared at some point. Its just a question of the location where this first happens.

Cable users are, in practice, experiencing higher bandwidth than DSL users. The assumption from the DSL camp is that sharing closer to home is a downside for the end user, but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise..

Could it be that Cable networks are forced to structure themselves better due to their nature? That th

The thing is with cable with 10 people on it, if 9 of them are downloading, fat chance of you checking your email.With ADSL, the backhaul is more than likely far faster than the individual connections added together, so no speed degration for anyone.

Its all about where the bottleneck is, and 99% of cases its the bit closest to the users.

You seem to be assuming that there's no congestion control on the cable. In practice, if 9 people are downloading and you try to get your email then they will all be throttled back a tiny bit, won't notice, and you'll think your connection is fine. Most cable ISPs (outside the USA) resegment if a part of their network is being congested.

Well, at 100Mbps you're using enough channels that it's unlikely that there are more channels open on the local segment for data unless the cable operator has moved to exclusively using switched digital video.

Each channel individually can do up to 42.66 Mbps downstream (U.S. DOCSIS) all on its own. It isnt hard to imagine ALL provider having at least 12 free channels, which equates to 512Mbps of downstream capacity.

This is why its hard to believe the grandparents claim that 9 users downloading at the same time can prevent you from getting your email.

Wrong, because even DOCSIS 2.0 supports 38 megabits/second. However, users are NEVER sold this full amount. They're sold a much lower cap.

For example, my Time Warner service is capped at 5 megabits/second. (The modem itself enforces this cap, probably modern headends double-check to make sure the modem has not been tampered with.) So it takes nearly 8 simultaneous full-downstream users before anyone sees evidence that their line is shared. For upstream, I have a cap of 512 kbps if I recall correctly. T

DOCSIS 2.0 supports 30Mb/s upstream PER CHANNEL, and either 42 or 55Mb/s downstream PER CHANNEL. The channels aren't shared between users that I know of.

For example, my Comcast is capped at 16Mb/s (my choice, they also offer 25, 30 and 50Mb service), and my upstream will peak at 30Mb/s in short bursts (First 10MB or so) then settle back to 10Mb/s. A year ago I had completely uncapped service and was able to download at the full 42Mb/s rate (although I could swear it was 52-55Mb/s), and I saturated the lin

Channels are shared between users - 1.0/1.1 used TDMA, 2.0/3.0 use either TDMA or S-CDMA.

However, as I mentioned in my post, as user count goes up, providers can throw more channels at the problem.

e.g. if you wanted to give 5 Mbps without any potential for slowdown within the cable network (not counting overselling of your backhaul), you could assign 7 users per channel. 8 users per channel would have a slight bit of sharing, but negligible.

I see. We are probably just very lucky out here then that Comcast isn't overselling their local capacity by enough to affect us.

BTW, I do believe that I swapped out my modem for a DOCSIS 3.0 one not too long ago as I think they said that was required for a 50Mb/s connect. I just didn't have to swap it back to the older modem when I downgraded back to 16Mb/s.

Currently where I am, they consider 16Mb/s down, 5Mb/s up as the entry level. Noone has lower than that. All older connections got bumped up to that

The thing is with cable with 10 people on it, if 9 of them are downloading, fat chance of you checking your email.
With ADSL, the backhaul is more than likely far faster than the individual connections added together, so no speed degration for anyone.

DOCSIS 3.0 is very different from ethernet - most importantly it's strictly time multiplexed. And slice allocation is such that you will be able to read your email just fine while your neighbors download and/or upload. There is no collision domain. So while it's "shared" it's not a free-for-all where the one with the most TCP connections wins. Fire up more connections and they just compete for your existing allocation. You're the only one who won't be able to check your email.

>>>DSL proponents like to point out the shared nature of cable, but forget that all internet connections get shared at some point

If the DSLAM is being fed with a 10 Gbit/s fiber line, then no, there won't be any slowdown even if all your DSL neighbors decide to bittorrent at the same time. A coaxial cable can carry about 5 Gbit/s... minus about 2400 Mbit/s for television and on-demand channels... leaving just ~2.5 Gbit/s for your neighborhood. i.e. Less bandwidth.

That "Shitty quality copper pair" is Cat6 and feeds nearly every Major circuit in the country. Yes, if your how was built in the 50's it's possible that you have some really old copper, but most people have stuff that's relatively new. The problem with DSL AND cable modems is the willingness of ISPs to oversell the connection.

Cat6 has NEVER been used for POTS line in the US, those are all going to be CAT3, and further even if they *were* Cat6 that wouldn't get you 100Mbps past a couple hundred meters, the only way to achieve those kinds of speeds is to do fiber to the curb or at most a remote shelf very near the house.

The main difference between DSL and DOCSIS cable is that DSL is your personal connection. No one is sharing it. DOCSIS cable line is shared between those on the same line, so if you have active warez people in your neighbourhood or someone hosting an active server of some kind, expect much lower speeds and higher latency then advertised.

Second difference, which has been largely negated lately is latency. DSL offers slightly lower latency by advantage of design.

Tradeoff is that DSL only uses one really shitty quality copper pair, that limits distance and maximum speed far more severely then cable's coaxial. This is exacerbated by the fact that many phone lines are from times before CAT3 home cabling, which is a realistic requirement to reach even ADSL2 level of speeds, causing end user speeds to be below 10mbps even over 24mbps ADSL2+ connection.

This is VERY wrong.

#1. DSL is shared just like cable, just at a slightly different point. Several DSL customers connect to the same node and from there, they are given times slices. example. My brother has aDSL, he has ~20 people on his local node and he had an 80ms ping to his first hop. Yes, his ISP that is just down the road is an 80ms jump. If he had this dedicated connection you talked about, it would be impossible to have anything much more than 1ms to his ISP.

Obviously FTTH and FTTC is better than cable, but it's mostly better on the reduced noise on the line. DOCSIS tech is really good, but if there is something wrong with your coax, it can sometimes be hard to diagnose the issue. With fiber, there is much reduced chance of having intermittent issues and it's more likely to just not work. I would rather my connection completely fail so my ISP can fix it, than have a problem go away when my ISP shows up to fix the unknown problem.

#1. DSL is shared just like cable, just at a slightly different point. Several DSL customers connect to the same node and from there, they are given times slices.

It's unclear what you call a 'node'. If you mean a local exchange then yes obviously a lot of people are going to connect to it. However each ISP usually has their own DSLAMs there and the customer's line plugs directly into the ISPs DSLAM. Then upstream of the DSLAM of course every thing travels on a single 'cable'. However that is normally a fiber optic line with far more bandwidth than the DSL lines that connect to it so it's no issue. There are still cases where the DSL plugs into a competitor's DSLAM a

Let me just chip in. I'm a Freenaute too, but i moved from Poland having a UPC (docsis 2, then docsis3) connection. The difference is astounding. Using ADSL2+, the top i can get is 28MB/s, but realistically nobody gets more than 12MB/s (on average) because of the distance to the DSLAM, which tends to be 1km-2kms. I get 10. Is there a way to fix that? No, because Cat3 can't carry frequencies above 2Mhz at that distance.

For comparison, i get 50MB/s back in PL without the line ever breaking a sweat, and if i w

DSL is a bit different because of the dslam, but Fiber and Cable is nearly the same.

Fiber lines have a dedicated line to the local node, the local node is shared by others and connects to the ISP via fiber. Cable has as shared connection to the node, but the node is connected to the ISP via a fiber link also.

Case in point: Some posters in other forums for my cable ISP claim that they get their 60mbps during peak hours and their power boost even hits ~120mbps.

That's absurd. The entire distinction between DOCSIS and FTTH is in the last mile, because they're last mile technologies. You can't just pass the last mile distinctions off as being trivial, when they're the only distinctions to be made. 56k modems on DS0s have dedicated lines to the CO, and that CO likely does optical transport deeper into the network. Does that make them "nearly the same" as DOCSIS and FTTH as well?

The issue isn't too many customers on the same COAX, but too many customers on the same node. If a Node has a 1gb fiber link and you have 100 customers, each with a 60mb connection, you're node is going to be overwhelmed. If you think changing the connection between the user and the node is going to make the connection from the node to ISP faster, I'd like to take what you're taking.

That really reminds me of all the discussions saying DSL was useless because already with 0.056Mbps modems the bottleneck was the connection between the local exchange and the ISP. Yet here I am maxing out my 12Mbps (>200x faster) ADSL connection anytime I want. I guess they must have upgraded the connection between the local exchange and the rest of the network. Why you think they will never do that again is beyond me.

It's fairly obvious that ANY internet connection is shared at some point. Hell, one of the main attractive points of using IP was how well it performed on shared connections.

Point was that, the point where you share your connection with other people on DSL is on DSLAM, which can both QoS people who such too much, as well as being connected with far more bandwith then last mile, typically making it impossible to congest by a single, or even several users. Essentially your copper pair going from DSLAM to your

Good job exploding the DSL vs cable myth. The tired old mantra is just repeated mindlessly as if the repeater understood a single thing about the issues involved. Everything depends on the particulars of each case.

**EVERY** consumer internet solution is shared bandwidth. That's the entire business model. The only question is which side of what router does everything get smashed together at.
You used to hear DSL advertising that they weren't shared bandwidth, you don't anymore (at least in the US) because it's not true.

That is not entirely true, you have a personal cable, but the DSLAM unit in the telephone operators building is shared mostly with 100/50/20/10 other subscribers, only the most expensive business DSL subscriptions come with a 1:1 congestion.

"today you have your own dedicated frequencies until the central hub in your area (AKA your personal connection). just like with ADSL."

That is entirely false. Layer 2 in a DOCSIS plant is shared fully amongst every cable modem locked on a given channel. Downstream access is scheduled by the CMTS entirely, while upstream access is requested by cable modems, and scheduled by the CMTS.

Additionally, the idea that shielded conductors somehow make distance trivial is absurd. DOCSIS cable plants are HFC, with fiber pushed as far out as possible. So far out, in fact, that many DOCSIS operators see PON as a natural evolution in their last mile. This isn't done just because fiber is super cool, or because yellow looks better than black. It's done because as soon as you transition to copper, the signal quality goes to absolute crap. In the main neighborhood copper loop after the last fiber node

I don't know about Harderwijk, but in the places where I've lived in NL there would be a tube from the house to the street, limiting the trenches to the actual street. There would be no trenches on your property.

Regardless, you're right. FTTH is (at this moment) unjustifiably expensive and disruptive when an alternative like this is available.

I remember when cable TV came to my parents' home (roughly 25 years ago). Fantastic for me and my sister, more TV channels to watch! Anyway part of the installation was digging a trench to the house. I don't think they would ever use the existing pipes such as the sewage pipe.

It could be that this cable is in a tube by itself with room to get another cable through, I really wouldn't know.

"laying FTTH" of course is nice, but it's also mighty expensive and disruptive to break open all the streets and dig trenches to everyone's home.

Most recent developments already have underground conduits. It shouldn't require more than targeted digging where each individual feed branches from the main. Not cheap, but I would think it's better than tearing up a whole street.

Most older developments have phone poles. They're not ideal, but it's doable to run fiber along them, and less expensive than digging

Most older developments have phone poles. They're not ideal, but it's doable to run fiber along them, and less expensive than digging to boot.

Many places outside of the USA (like The Netherlands what this story is about) keep all their cables underground, except high voltage power lines. Actually all of Europe does this, except in the mountains where the ground is too rocky to dig. It costs more to set up, but much more reliable and no ugly poles all over the place.

Where I live, we have cable in a star topology, rather than ring/loop, and just in these 4 houses, there are 220 apartments. Yet I can still hit 5-6 MB/s during peak hours, on a 50Mb/s down connection, from a decent FTP like say Sunet.

Cable is basically always star with regards to multiple houses. Reason is that cable companies need to be able to charge per house, connect and disconnect services per house. If it was looped through all places, well then they'd lose any ability to do that.

What you also discover is that for a lot of reasons, cable Internet being one of them, they've built out the fiber part of their network quite far. The cable network isn't all coax and hasn't been forever. It is called a HFC, Hybrid Fiber Coax, network because that is what it is. So you find that because of that, they can and do segment it down pretty far. Yes you'll share with other places, but probably somewhere in the 32-128 realm, which is the same you get with a FTTH PON connection.

Also with DOCSIS 3 they can separate users out even more. DOCSIS 3 allows for multiple channels to be used for data (that is how it gets its speed). Well they can have even more channels than a single person gets. So each user gets, say, 4 channels (152mbits) on their modem. However they have a total of 16 channels for a segment. They then stagger what channels users are on so there's less sharing going on.

Don't get me wrong, FTTH has the capacity to be faster in the long run, fiber optics just has more theoretical bandwidth because of that whole Shannon's Law thing. However cable can work very well, and does when providers want it to.

We have star all the way out to individual apartments. Channels and such can be switched on and off per endpoint if our current cable operator would use that(They bought up the last one, which used to do that. No need for decoder boxes and cards, you just called, ordered a channel subscription, 5 minutes later at most you'd have it available).

So, in our stairwell, there's a pretty beefy tube running that holds the individual cables for each apartment, going down to the central switch cabinet in the house. E

We're running star topology, with each apartment being a separate endpoint. And the topology has been in place since the late 80's. It was a special niche for the company that ran the cable network back then. Among other things, they could administer what channels you had available centrally, and just toggle what endpoints could see it, based on subscriptions etc.

As for gigabit ethernet? No, last time we checked, it would cost us about the same to have it installed, and all apartments prepared for it, as th

Strictly speaking, we need food, water, shelter and human companionship. Some of us would beg to differ on the latter.

Everything else is a luxury. We defined that certain luxuries should now be considered essential. That's okay. But the reason for this reassignment can have its root in pure wishing, liking and wanting.

I'm not gonna die if I can't download whatever off the internet in the blink of an eye. But I'm gonna like being able to do it a hell of a lot.

Er, we also need medical services. It is arguable that society should provide food, water, shelter, and medical services at some level to everyone at no direct cost[*]. If it doesn't do that, it is questionable what the value of society is in moral terms. I don't think there has ever been a governmental jurisdiction in the world which has done this, however. I guess the best is yet to come:)

[*] Yes, tiresome libertarian extremists, I am aware that nothing is without cost. I am talking about point of p

Drop the torrenting for some better P2P solution, and your connection will be sufficient. Back when I shared an apartment with several other people, as soon as we blocked torrents, 5 people could split a (back then blazing fast) 24Mb/s down connection.

For me the biggest hurdle to cable internet is the fact I have to change provider plus I can't get it without TV.

For TV I prefer my satellite dish and we are waiting for legislation to force the cable owners to allow other ISP's access.

The cable ISP's are notorious for their lack of service and totally clueless help desks, until they match good ol' xs4all.nl I'm not tempted and stay on VDSL with 40/3Mbits/sec and especially shell access.